although she could hardly have said anything else, he had a feeling she
was sincere.
So, what do I want? he thought. Do I want to marry her?
He sat down behind his desk. He had a lot to do. He pressed the intercom
and spoke to Carol.
“Ring the Department of Energy for me, and find out exactly when–I mean
what time–they plan to announce the name of the company that won the
license for the Shield oil field.”
“Certainly,” she said.
“Then ring Fett and Co. for me. I want Nathaniel Fett, the boss.”
“Right.”
He flipped the switch up. He thought again: do I want to marry Ellen
Hamilton?
Suddenly he knew the answer, and it astonished him.
TEN A. M..
THE EDITOR of the Evening Post was under the illusion that he belonged
to the ruling class. The son of a railway clerk, he had climbed the
social ladder very fast in the twenty years since’ he left school. When
he needed reassurance, he would remind himself that he was a director of
Evening Post Ltd.” and an opinion former; and that his income placed him
in the top nine percent of heads of households. It did not occur to him
that he would never have become an opinion former were it not that his
opinions coincided exactly with those of the newspaper’s proprietor; nor
that his directorship was in the proprietor’s gift; nor that the ruling
class is defined by wealth, rather than income. And he had no idea that
his ready-to-wear suit by Cardin, his shaky plum-in-the mouth accent,
and his four-bedroom executive home in Chislehurst marked him plainly,
in the jaundiced eyes of cynics like Arthur Cole, as a poor boy made
good: more plainly than if he had worn a cloth cap and cycle clips.
Cole arrived in the editor’s office on the dot of ten o’clock, with his
tie straightened, his thoughts marshaled, and his list typed out. He
realized instantly that that was an error. He should have burst in two
minutes late in his shirtsleeves, to give the impression he had
reluctantly torn himself away from the hot seat in the newsroom
powerhouse for the purpose of giving less essential personnel a quick
rundown on what was going on in really important departments. But then,
he always thought of these things too late: he was no good at office
politics. It would be interesting to watch how other?
executives made their entrance into the morning conference.
The editor’s office was trendy. The desk was white and the easy chairs
came from Habitat. Vertical venetian blinds shaded the blue carpet from
sunlight, and the aluminum-and-melamine bookcases had smoked-glass
doors. On a side table were copies of all the morning papers, and a pile
of yesterday’s editions of the Evening Post.
He sat behind the white desk, smoking a thin cigar and reading the
Mirror. The sight made Cole yearn for a cigarette. He popped a
peppermint into his mouth as a substitute.
The others came in in a bunch: the picture editor, in a tight-fitting
shirt, with shoulder-length hair many women would envy; the sports
editor, in a tweed jacket and lilac shirt; the features editor, with a
pipe and a permanent slight grin; and the circulation manager, a young
man in an immaculate gray suit who had started out selling encyclopedias
and risen to this lofty height in only five years. The dramatic
last-minute entrance was made by the chief sub-editor, the paper’s
designer; a short man with close-cropped hair, wearing suspenders. There
was a pencil behind his ear.
When they were all seated, the editor tossed the Mirror onto the side
table and pulled his chair closer to his desk. He said: “No first
edition yet?”
“No.” The chief sub looked at his watch. “We lost eight minutes because
of a web break.”
The editor switched his gaze to the circulation manager. “How does that
affect you?”
He, too, was looking at his watch. “if it’s only eight minutes, and if
you can catch up by the next edition, we can wear it.”
The editor said: “We seem to have a web break every bloody day.”
“fit’s this bog-paper we’re printing on,” the chief sub said.